The English Novel eBook

as most other things about him. This phrase or
expression is of course artificial to the highest
degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending
on mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously
figured, tricked, machined as it is—­easy
as once more it may be to prove that it is artifice
and not art—­the fact remains that, not merely
(perhaps not by any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces
which everybody knows, but almost everywhere, it is
triumphant: and that English literature would
be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly
never was there a style which more fully justified
the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne’s
own time, of style as “the very man.”
Falsetto, “faking,” vamping, shoddy—­all
manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without
the possibility of completely clearing it from them.
To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most
ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe
against critics. It leaves the court with all
manner of stains on its character. Only, once
more, if it did not exist we should be ignorant of
more than one of the most remarkable possibilities
of the English language.

Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical
generation—­from the appearance of Pamela
in 1740 to that of Humphry Clinker in 1771—­the
wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with
four main wheels to move it, and set a-going to travel
through the centuries. In a sense, inasmuch as
Humphry Clinker itself, though Smollett’s
best work, can hardly be said to show any absolutely
new faculties, character, or method, the process was
even accomplished in two-thirds of the time, between
Pamela and Tristram Shandy. We shall
see in the next chapter how eagerly the examples were
taken up: and how, long before Smollett died,
the novel of this and that kind had become one of the
most prolific branches of literature. But, for
the moment, the important thing is to repeat that
it had been thoroughly and finally started on its
high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and
Smollett; in particular and wayward but promising
side-paths by Sterne.

CHAPTER IV

THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7]

[7] A little of the work to be noticed
in this chapter is not strictly eighteenth century,
but belongs to the first decade or so of the nineteenth.
But the majority of the contents actually conform
to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient
or generally applicable heading for the novel
before Miss Austen and Scott, excluding the great
names dealt with in the last chapter.

It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle,
though it is still much too often forgotten in practice,
that the minor work of a time is at least as important
as the major in determining general literary characteristics
and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much more